American/English terms for various sizes of lumber

Hi all. I’d like to know the American/English terms for the various sizes of lumber. For instance, a plank is a flat piece of wood. According to wikipedia, usually from sawn timber, more than 38 mm thick, and generally wider than 63 mm. If the width is less than 63 mm and the thickness less than 38 mm is called board.

But how do you name a 2’‘x2’’ piece of wood? may I refer to a 2’‘x2’’ piece of wood as a 2’‘x2’’ plank? or a plank must be rectangular?

And what about a batten? What is the range of size of a batten?—-I have tried to find a list of such terms on the web, but strangely I didn’t succeed.

thank you Alistar. So for now I know:plankboardpost (btw, may a post be round?)batten—-anyway, I think I cannot say a 10’‘x10’’ batten, I mean, I think it’s a 10×10 beam or something similar. So what may the larger dimensions of a batten be?

funny, funny, thank you—-A batten is “a narrow strips of wood used to cover joints or as decorative vertical members over plywood or wide boards”. In fact I have found the “Board & Batten Style Shutters” here

I guess a batten is about 2’‘x2’’ in size at most, but I have found this case too: maybe it’s a mistake, they seem match-boards to me, not battens.

a post seems to be greater then a batten: compare posts with battens, and in any case a post is “a long piece of wood or other material set upright into the ground to serve as a marker or support”, so it seems to me that this term refers mainly to the function, and only secondly to the size.

Often in English the function will determine the name used for a piece. As you have found, a post is defined more by it’s purpose than by it’s size or shape. Likewise a batten is more likely to describe a function than a size.

To make it more confusing, in North America we call a piece a timber if it’s quite large dimension and here “timber construction” means heavy post and beam style. In other English speaking countries timber just means wood or what we call “lumber” and “timber construction” simply means made of wood.

thank you Paul. Yes, in Italian there are many different terms, but this is probably due to the many different regional dialects we have. For instance, we have the term ‘morale’ (nothing to do with moral :-)) which means a 5×5 (up to 8×8) cm plank. But we have also the ‘mezzo morale’, mezzo means half, meaning a 3×6 (up to 6×12) cm plank (a ‘morale’ is square, a ‘mezzo morale’ rectangular). BTW, I have also found in a boatbuilding book that ‘timber’ means (or meant?) the ribs of a hull; there was the floor-timber too, wasn’t it?

Antonio,These are some of the things that I think you would have to live here (or I there) to really understand very well. We use all kinds of terms interchangeably for the same things. For instance we might refer to the same thing as:1) A stack of wood2) A stack of boards3) A stack of planks4) A stack of lumber / timber

We are really vague about sizes. Board or plank can mean any reasonably sized piece, although the term small board would be more likely than small plank. Small pieces are simply pieces although we may refer to them as blocks, sticks or slabs in certain shapes.

General softwood construction lumber here is referred to by it’s dimension. In fact we refer to it as dimension lumber . We refer for example to a 2 by 6 or a 2 by 4 (2×6, 2×4) as just that. We don’t say “a 2 by 6 board” (or plank), we just say “a 2 by 6”. Of course that too is misleading as a 2×6, after milling and planing arrives at the lumber store at about 1 1/2” by 5 1/2”.

And then there are the trade related terms as you have noted. It is true that a ship’s timbers generally refers to her ribs, but she also has floor timbers (join the ribs at the bottom across the keel) and may have stern timbers, stem timbers and others. Again, timbers is used to denote heavy pieces.